2015 Data Science Salary Survey

Finding a New Position

THE LAST PIECE OF INFORMATION we will investigate is a different kind of rating: how easy it would be to find a new position, assuming that the new job is more or less equivalent to the respondent’s current one, in terms of compensation, workload, and interest in the work. Like the bargaining skills rating, this metric is quite subjective, but it is an important dimension parallel to salary. Answers were also based on a five-point scale: “1” signifying “very difficult” and “5” signifying “very easy.”

The overall results were optimistically high: almost one-quarter gave the top score of 5, and only 13% thought their prospects would translate to a 1 or 2. Salary and (expected) ease of finding work turn out to be highly correlated: the groups of respondents who gave answers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 have median salaries $64,00, $78,000, $80,000, $92,000, and $112,000. In terms of geographic location, the highest average responses come from California, the Northeast US, and Texas (3.9), followed by UK/Ireland, the Southwestern US, and the Midwest (3.8).

The major tools (those with >5% usage rates) can similarly be ranked by the mean “ease of finding new work” scores of their users. The top four tools by this metric were Amazon Redshift, Teradata, Amazon EMR, and Cloudera (mean score, 3.92 to 3.98), while the bottom four tools were SPSS, C#, Perl, and BusinessObjects.

EASE OF FINDING NEW WORK (AT AN EQUIVALENT LEVEL) FROM 1-5 (1 Being very difficult, 5 Being very easy) ...